Miss Alcott’s ‘Pen Pal’

BOOK BOND: In her new book, Bakke '77N, a one-time member of the Weather Underground who made her career as a pediatric oncology nurse, imagines talking to fellow social activist and author Alcott (opposite) as a way to discuss making changes in society.

The decision to leave the notorious Weather Underground was a quick one.
In early 1973, while protesting the Vietnam War at a demonstration in Berkeley,
California, Kit Bakke ’77N found herself surrounded by
police, their guns drawn.

As a member of the radical political activist group, Bakke certainly had
seen guns pointed in her direction over the past couple of years. But things
were different now. She was pregnant. Bakke made her way home, where she
spent the night trying to figure out how she was going to make a living and
provide for her child.

That night of soul-searching would eventually lead Bakke to the University,
a career in nursing and now, as a middle-class, middle-aged wife, and mother
of two grown daughters, to book signings across the country for her new bio-memoir Miss
Alcott’s E-mail, Yours for Reforms of All Kinds (David R. Godine,
2006). The book is a collection of feigned correspondence between Bakke and
19th-century author Louisa May Alcott, both of whom shared a moral responsibility
to battle injustice.

“Life is about making choices, about living by your principles and
by your ideas,” says Bakke, a meticulous researcher whose book also
examines transcendentalism, the abolitionist movement, and women’s
rights. “And that’s what attracted me so much to Louisa. She
didn’t just live her life—she made it, she constructed it from
her ideas. I believe in, admittedly smaller ways, that’s what I did
as well.”

Bakke worked for Students for a Democratic Society before signing on with
the Weather Underground in 1969. During her stint with the revolutionary
splinter group—which hoped that a more secretive, militant strategy
would yield more results than public, peaceful demonstrations had—the
FBI amassed a 400-page file in her name. Bakke keeps a yellowed copy of the
file in her study.

“None of us thought we personally had any future,” she says. “We
didn’t see our lives as being worth anything, so we weren’t risking
anything that mattered. We were so focused on stopping what we saw as this
incredible moral evil, this monster that was stalking the planet in our names.
We wanted to throw ourselves into the cogs and make it stop.”

Bakke did not see trading her education in making Molotov cocktails for
one that landed her on a college campus as defection. As a nurse, she thought,
she could go to Vietnam and help those who had been victimized by the United
States.

While taking science courses in California, Bakke learned about Rochester’s
innovative nursing program from a woman in her organic chemistry class. By
the time the 28-year-old enrolled at the school—where she was older
than most of her classmates—her daughter, Maya, was 2. By that time
Bakke spoke little of her turbulent past.

“It didn’t come up in conversation all that much,” she
says. “I’m very easily absorbed in what’s going on around
me right this second. I don’t borrow trouble from the future and I
don’t stew over the past.”

Bakke never got to Vietnam. Wanting her daughter to grow up near relatives,
she drove to her hometown near Seattle the week before graduation—she
had earned her class’s Clare Dennison Prize for Outstanding Proficiency
in General Nursing Care—and began a hospital job working with cancer-stricken
children on the night of her commencement. When Maya was 6, Bakke met her
future husband. They were married in 1982 and their daughter, Tess, was born
the following year.

Bakke, now 60, got the idea for her debut book in 2001 while on a dinner
cruise with other tourists in Paris, one month after the Twin Towers were
attacked. As the boat’s loudspeaker played “America the Beautiful,” the
tourists began singing through their tears—including Bakke, who was
surprised by her reaction. She had never thought of herself as a patriotic
American. Believing that her emotions had “rational roots,” she
decided to learn more about the country’s history and the “strong,
thoughtful, principled values” that people centuries ago seemed eager
to wear on their sleeves. It wasn’t until late 2002 that Alcott popped
into her mind as a perfect example.

Bakke found that they had more in common than she could have predicted.
Both had lived in a commune and had chosen nursing as a profession. (Bakke
would spend most of her time as a nurse working with oncology and hospice
patients, two areas inspired by a mid-1970s trip with a Rochester faculty
member to a pioneering hospice in London; Bakke no longer practices but maintains
her license.)

“Some people have suggested serious spiritual channeling,” says
Bakke, who refers to Alcott in conversation as if she were a close friend. “I
reject that notion, but I must admit it’s pretty weird.”

Miss Alcott’s E-mail pays tribute to the ideas, energy, and
humor that defined Alcott—whose neighbors growing up included Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. The tagline, “Yours
for reforms of all kinds,” was how Alcott signed some of her letters
to her woman’s suffrage pen pals.

Supposedly reaching a reflective Alcott in the last six months of her life,
Bakke asks questions about society, including this one posed to Alcott in
the middle of the book: “Now that we’re older, how do we remain
helpful and useful to the cause of liberty, justice, and peace?”

For her part, Bakke works with established charitable organizations that
strive to alleviate homelessness, substance abuse, and other problems at
the local level. She’s at work on a second book, which she describes
as a contemporary novel about a middle-aged woman who loses her grip on her
perfectly satisfactory life, has some adventures, and makes some mistakes.

Despite the errors in her own past, Bakke says she doesn’t have any
regrets.

“Of course we made mistakes, but everybody makes mistakes,” she
says. “I believe in putting yourself out there for the things you care
about. If you don’t do that, you’re going to live a diminished life.”

—Robin L. Flanigan

Robin L. Flanigan is a Rochester-based freelance writer. For more about
Bakke, Alcott, and Miss Alcott’s E-mail, visit www.kitbakke.com.